The Sentinels I'd pop a cap in sancho and I'd

@Sulukinak

The forest was unfamiliar to him. Of course it was; he'd never been here before. But even the variety of trees was new to him, and the scorched stumps of some sent tiny shivers racing down his spine. He found one trunk hollow, and when he stood inside the impressive footprint, he could stare up through the trunk at the twinkling stars.

"Hello up there," he called, and his ears perked as his voice echoed up the hollow space, louder at the top and called more quietly back to him. Eerie.

He stepped back, his fur prickling, and gazed around at the years-old wreckage. Most of it now was covered by carpets of moss and ferns, but when one looked very closely, one could see the ruin of yesteryear.

"What happened here?" he asked himself, and in that same, strange echo, the forest asked it back.

i wonder too, crept a real voice from a hidden place. as sulukinak emerged there was an obvious reluctance to her movements; fluid as she was in these shadows, these ferns.

the girl had seen this stranger from afar, having thought the odd shine of their gilded coat was something precious, only to see it was actually a man.

should she run? tempting.

He hadn't expected to find another so close. He jumped, just a little, and his nostrils flared hungrily while he took in her scent, wondering why he hadn't caught it before. There was something about the young woman that unnerved him. Her uncertainty, though he did not realize it. He fancied that he wanted to set her at ease, but truly, her uneasiness only made him want to flee himself.

You never knew what a cornered animal might do.

"These are the teeth marks of fire," he told her, pointing to the blackened flesh of the fallen tree. "But it must have been a big fire, to fell so large a tree."

He studied it a beat longer before his gaze went back to her.

"My name is Arkadiy," he told her.